Paper Info
Title
Unnecessarily Identifiable: Quantifying the fingerprintability of browser extensions due to bloat
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate to what extent the page modifications that make browser extensions fingerprintable are necessary for their operation. We characterize page modifications that are completely unnecessary for the extension's functionality as extension bloat. By analyzing 58,034 extensions from the Google Chrome store, we discovered that 5.7% of them were unnecessarily identifiable because of extension bloat. To protect users against unnecessary extension fingerprinting due to bloat, we describe the design and implementation of an in-browser mechanism that provides coarse-grained access control for extensions on all websites. The proposed mechanism and its built-in policies, does not only protect users from fingerprinting, but also offers additional protection against malicious extensions exfiltrating user data from sensitive websites.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3308558.3313458
WWW '19: The Web Conference San Francisco CA USA May, 2019
Field
DocType
ISBN
World Wide Web,Computer science,User engagement,Readability,Access control,Backtracking
Conference
978-1-4503-6674-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oleksii Starov11029.31
Pierre Laperdrix2647.97
Alexandros Kapravelos332420.58
Nick Nikiforakis486553.35